Cancer therapies comprise a wide range of therapeutic approaches, including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. While the various approaches allow a broad selection of treatments to be available to the medical practitioner to treat the cancer, existing therapeutics suffer from a number of disadvantages, such as a lack of selectivity of targeting cancer cells over normal, healthy cells, and the development of resistance by the cancer to the treatment.
Recent approaches based on targeted therapeutics, which interfere with cellular processes of cancer cells preferentially over normal cells, have led to chemotherapeutic regimens with fewer side effects as compared to non-targeted therapies such as radiation treatment.
Cancer immunotherapy, in particular the development of agents that activate T cells of the host's immune system to prevent the proliferation of or kill cancer cells, has emerged as a promising therapeutic approach to complement existing standards of care. See, e.g., Miller, et al. Cancer Cell, 27, 439-449 (2015). Such immunotherapy approaches include the development of antibodies used to modulate the immune system to kill cancer cells. For example, anti-PD-1 blocking antibodies pembrolizumab (Keytruda®) and nivolumab (Opdivo®) have been approved in the US and the European Union to treat diseases such as unresectable or metastatic melanoma and metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Efforts to inhibit immunosuppressive proteins such as CTLA-4 have led to the development and clinical evaluation of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies, such as tremelimumab and ipilimumab (Yervoy®).
There remains a need for alternative approaches and additional cancer treatments to complement existing therapeutic standards of care.